We started to use Xnote to create a solution to improve time registration in athletic events.Real electronic time is a little to expensive for most clubs. Therefore most clubs still works with traditional manual recording which demands involvement of many people and which is error prone.We started a project to investigate if we could improve current situation without spending too much money.Our approach is to work only with Common off the Shelf (COTS) products. By only using COTS products we can easy replace parts of the solution once better pieces are found.

We started with Xnote.We designed a hand-held device to make operators job easier and to prevent input mistakes.We designed a spreadsheet to be used for final registration that allows us to recalculate electronic measured time to manual time as the athletic organization demands and to connect the names of athlete based on his number.We thought how we could make a video registration that combines Xnote time measurement with the visual recording of the athlete that pass the finish line.We worked out and tested an affordable finish registration deviceWe are currently in the process of adding a start device either

We created a report of the purpose and all the steps taken. This report and other material is continuously in progress but is available for anyone Please feel free to visited:

One of the improvements is that start and finish detection are fully automated now and instead of using an USB webcam we are now using an IP camera (Started with Foscam 30pfs static but are using a Vivotek IP7154 now) for vision recording. Another big improvement is that "StopWatch" build a special version of XNote for me that broadcast XNote messages (Start/Stop, Snap and Reset events).We build a special edition of CamStudio recording software (Sourceforge) that looks out for these messages and will Start/Stop & Terminate vision recording.For those who are interested. This Camstudio4Xnote exe as well as the required XNote 1.6 "Camstudio edition" can be downloaded from my website:

Beware that this CamStudio4Xnote edition is not official released Camstudio. Although there is development the Camstudio for download is quite an old one. But source are available in Camstudio's SVN (In case you would like to build it yourselves). (FYI CamStudio is looking out for developers and testers, any non XNote related bugs found you can report in the Camstudio forum.)

Other goodies:Mr. Stopwatch said he will apply the XNote message broadcasting in the next XNote release. (available with version 1.61)I have to update the report I wrote a year ago about this project. I'm doing many things different now. (see link message Feb 2009)